This week Steve Klabnik took the time to dig into why subclassing Ruby core classes might be a bad idea. He focuses mostly on how It often provides surprising and unexpected results to other developers and offers some ideas on what to do to avoid it.

Last week, Codemy published the first part of their Optimizing Rails series where they focus on finding and fixing N + 1 queries. This is intended to be a series on how to avoid Rails pitfalls, so follow along if you're interested in Ruby and Rails performance.

This week Matz emailed us to let us know about Ruby Prize. Ruby Prize was created to recognize the efforts of new members to the Ruby community. The winner will receive ¥1,000,000 (or one million yen). So, if you know someone who has made major contributions within the prior two to three years to the Ruby community, think about giving them a nomination.

Last week, Hongli Lai of the Phusion team reached out to us to let us know about Flynn, an open source Platform as a Service built on top of Docker. Once complete, it can be thought of similarly to Heroku, but will allow you to deploy your stack anywhere. They're currently crowdfunding their effort using the SelfStarter project and they're extremely close to reaching their goal.

Last week, the team at Bloc released a web-based, canvas-driven version of Ryan Bates’s Ruby Warrior. With it, you get to play an 8-bit game while learning some Ruby programming. It’s a fun way to play with Ruby and it's enjoyable for both experienced and new(-ish) Ruby developers.